As a boy, Charles Robert Darwin collected anything that caught his interest: insects, coins and interesting stones. He was not very clever, but Darwin was good at doing the things that interested him.
His father was a doctor, so Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, and was planned to follow a medical career. But Charles found the lectures boring. Then his father sent him to Cambridge University to study to be a priest. While at Cambridge, Darwin’s interest in zoology and geography grew. Later he got a letter from Robert FitzRoy who was planning to make a voyage around the world on a ship, the Beagle. He wanted a naturalist to join the ship, and Darwin was recommended(推荐). That voyage was the start of Darwin’s great life.
As the Beagle sailed around the world, Darwin began to wonder how life had developed on earth. He began to observe everything. After he was home, he set to work, getting his collection in order. His first great work The Zoology of the Beagle was well received, but he was slow to make public his ideas on the origin of life.
Later Darwin and Wallace, another naturalist who had the same opinions as Darwin, produced a paper together. Darwin’s great book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (《物种起源》) appeared. It attracted a storm. People thought that Darwin was saying they were descended from monkeys. What a shameful idea! Although most scientists agreed that Darwin was right, the Church was still so strong that Darwin never received any honors for his work.
Afterwards, he published another great work, The Descent of Man. His health grew worse, but he still worked. “When I have to give up observation, I shall die,” he said. He was still working on 17, April, 1882. He was dead two days later.
Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
| A．Charles Darwin’s ideas |
| B．Charles Darwin’s works |
| C．Father of modern biology: Charles Darwin |
| D．The greatest scientist: Charles Darwin |
Darwin’s father sent him to Edinburgh to _____.
| A．make him like natural history |
| B．make him become a doctor |
| C．let him change his hobbies |
| D．have him give up his collection |
According to the passage, Charles Darwin’s whole life was changed by _____.
| A．his study at Cambridge University |
| B．his collection of coins |
| C．the naturalists at Cambridge |
| D．the voyage of the Beagle |
We can learn from the passage that _____.
| A．Darwin announced his ideas on the origin of life as soon as he finished his voyage |
| B．Wallace agreed with Darwin’s opinions and wrote The Descent of Man with him |
| C．Darwin wrote two great books and a paper during his lifetime |
| D．churchmen were strongly against Darwin’s ideas at that time |
When I was fourteen, I earned money in the summer by cutting lawns (草坪), and within a few weeks I had built up a body of customers. I got to know people by the flowers they planted that I had to remember not to cut down, by the things they lost in the grass or stuck in the ground on purpose. I reached the point with most of them when I knew in advance what complaint was about to be spoken, which particular request was most important. And I learned something about the measure of my neighbors by their preferred method of payment: by the job, by the month—or not at all.
Mr. Ballou fell into the last category, and he always had a reason why. On one day, he had no change for a fifty, on another he was flat out of checks, and on another, he was simply out when I knocked on his door. Still, except for the money, he was a nice enough guy, always waving or tipping his hat when he’d seen me from a distance. I figured it was a thin retirement check, or maybe a work-related injury that kept him from doing his own yard work. Surely, I kept record of the total, but I didn’t worry about the amount too much. Grass was grass, and Mr. Ballou’s property didn’t take long to trim (修剪).
Then, one late afternoon in mid-July, the hottest time of the year, I was walking by his house and he opened the door, mentioned me to come inside. The hall was cool, shaded, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust to the dim light.
“I owe you,” Mr. Ballou, “but…”
I thought I’d save him the trouble of thinking of a new excuse. “No problem. Don’t worry about it.”
“The bank made a mistake in my account,” he continued, ignoring my words. “It will be cleared up in a day or two. But in the meantime I thought perhaps you could choose one or two volumes for a down payment (首期付款).
He gestured toward the walls and I saw that books were stacked (堆放) everywhere. It was like a library, except with no order to the arrangement.
“Take your time,” Mr. Ballou encouraged. “Read, borrow, keep. Find something you like. What do you read?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I generally read what was in front of me, what I could get from the paperback stacked at the drugstore, what I found at the library, magazines, the back of cereal boxes, comics. The idea of consciously seeking out a special title was new to me, but, I realized, not without appeal-- so I started to look through the piles of books.
“You actually read all of these?”
“This isn’t much,” Mr. Ballou said. “This is nothing, just what I’ve kept, the ones worth looking at a second time.”
“Pick for me, then.”
He raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and regarded me as though measuring me for a suit. After a moment, he nodded, searched through a stack, and handed me a dark red hardbound (精装本) book, fairly thick.
“The Last of the Just,” I read. “By Andre Schwarz-Bart. What’s it about?”
“You tell me,” he said. “Next week.”
I started after supper, sitting outdoors on an uncomfortable kitchen chair. Within a few pages, the yard, the summer, disappeared, and I was thrown into the aching tragedy of the Holocaust, the extraordinary clash of good, represented by one decent man, and evil. Translated from French, the language was elegant, simple, impossible to resist. When the evening light finally failed I moved inside, reading all through the night.
To this day, thirty years later, I vividly remember the experience. It was my first voluntary encounter (接触、遇到) with world literature, and I was stunned (震惊) by the concentrated power a novel could contain. I lacked the vocabulary, however, to translate my feelings into words. So the next week when Mr. Ballou asked, “Well?” I only replied, “It was good.”
“Keep it, then,” he said. “Shall I suggest another?”
I nodded, and was presented with the paperback (平装本) edition of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa ( a very important book on the study of the social and cultural development of peoples-- anthropology (人类学)).
To make two long stories short, Mr. Ballou never paid me a cent for cutting his grass that year or the next, but for fifteen years I taught anthropology at Dartmouth College. Summer reading was not the innocent entertainment I had assumed it to be, not a light-hearted, instantly forgettable escape in a hammock (吊床) (though I have since enjoyed many of those, too). A book, if it arrives before you at the right moment, in the proper season, at an internal in the daily business of things, will change the course of all that follows.The author found the first book Mr. Ballou gave him _________.
| A．light-hearted and enjoyable |
| B．dull but well written |
| C．impossible to put down |
| D．difficult to understand |
From what he said to the author, we can infer that Mr. Ballou _________.
| A．read all books twice |
| B．did not do much reading |
| C．read more books than he kept |
| D．preferred to read hardbound books |
The following year the author _________.
| A．started studying anthropology at college |
| B．continued to cut Mr. Ballou’s lawn |
| C．spent most of his time lazing away in a hammock |
| D．had forgotten what he had read the summer before |
The author’s main point is that _________.
| A．summer jobs are really good for young people |
| B．you should insist on being paid before you do a job |
| C．a good book can change the direction of your life |
| D．a book is like a garden carried in the pocket |
The $11 billion self-help industry is built on the idea that you should turn negative thoughts like “I never do anything right” into positive ones like “I can succeed”. But was positive thinking advocate Norman Vincent Peale right? Is there power in positive thinking?
Researchers in Canada just published a study in the journal Psychological Science that says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are.
The study's authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin by citing (引证) older research showing that when people get feedback which they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you tell your friend who is slow to learn that he has the potential of an Einstein, you’re just underlining his faults. In one 1990s experiment, a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write essays against funding for the disabled. When the essayists were later praised for their sympathy, they felt even worse about what they had written.
In this experiment, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students’ self-esteem (自尊). The participants were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds, one group of students heard a bell. When it rang, they were supposed to tell themselves, “I am lovable.”
Those with low self-esteem didn’t feel better after the forced self-affirmation (自我肯定). In fact, their moods turned significantly darker than those of members of the control group, who weren’t urged to think of positive thoughts.
The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy (心理治疗) that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can make things worse. Meditation (静思) techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic viewpoint. Call it the power of negative thinking. The first paragraph is written _________.
| A．to raise an argument about positive thinking |
| B．to introduce the power of positive thinking |
| C．to encourage people to have positive thoughts |
| D．to introduce the $11 billion self-help industry |
According to the study of the Canadian researchers, _________.
| A．positive thinking is not as powerful as negative thinking |
| B．encouraging positive thinking may actually discourage people |
| C．happy people can think positively while unhappy people can’t |
| D．getting people to think positively can strengthen their confidence |
What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 mean?
| A．You are pointing out the mistakes he has made. |
| B．You are reminding him that he is not intelligent. |
| C．You are not taking his mistakes seriously enough. |
| D．You are showing he has great potential in spite of faults. |
We can learn from the last paragraph that _________.
| A．negative feelings must be got rid of |
| B．there’s no point in thinking positively |
| C．it doesn’t make sense to think negatively |
| D．negative thinking is not always negative |
Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the best. For example, to absorb heat from the sun to heat water, you need large, flat, black surfaces. One way to do that is to build those surfaces specially, on the roofs of buildings. But why go to all that trouble when cities are full of black surfaces already, in the form of asphalt (柏油) roads?
Ten years ago, this thought came into the mind of Arian de Bondt, a Dutch engineer. He finally persuaded his boss to follow it up. The result is that their building is now heated in winter and cooled in summer by a system that relies on the surface of the road outside.
The heat-collector is a system of connected water pipes. Most of them ran from one side of the street to the other, just under the asphalt road. Some, however, dive deep into the ground.
When the street surface gets hot in summer, water pumped through the pipes picks up this heat and takes it underground through one of the diving pipes. At a depth of 100 meters lies a natural aquifer (蓄水层) into which several heat exchangers (交换器) have been built. The hot water from the street runs through these exchangers, warming the ground-water, before returning to the surface through another pipe. The aquifer is thus used as a heat store.
In winter, the working system is changed slightly. Water is pumped through the heat exchangers to pick up the heat stored during summer. This water goes into the building and is used to warm the place up. After performing that task, it is pumped under the asphalt and its remaining heat keeps the road free of snow and ice. Which of the following is TRUE according to the first two paragraphs?
| A．Arian de Bondt got his idea from his boss. |
| B．Large, flat, black surfaces need to be built in cities. |
| C．Heat can also be collected from asphalt roads. |
| D．The Dutch engineer's system has been widely used. |
For what purpose are the diving pipes used?
| A．To absorb heat from the sun. |
| B．To store heat for future use. |
| C．To turn solar energy into heat energy. |
| D．To carry heat down below the surface. |
From the last paragraph we can learn that _________.
| A．the system can do more than warming up the building |
| B．some pipes have to be re-arranged in winter |
| C．the exchangers will pick up heat from the street surface |
| D．less heat may be collected in winter than in summer |
What is most likely to be discussed in the paragraph that follows?
| A．What we shall do if the system goes wrong. |
| B．What we shall do if there are no asphalt roads. |
| C．How the system cools the building in summer. |
| D．How the system collects heat in spring and autumn. |
Money Matters for Students
GETTING A GRANT（补助）
Who pays?
The Local Education Authority (LEA) for the area in which the student is living.
Who can get this money?
Anyone who gets a place on a first degree course, although a student who has already attended a course of advanced further education may not. Students must also have been resident in the UK for at least three years, which can exclude (排除) some students from overseas.
SPECIAL CASES
If a student has worked before going to college:
A student who is 26 or more before the course starts and who has worked for at least three of the previous six years will get extra money--￡155 a year if 26, increasing to a maximum of ￡615 at 29 or more.
If a student is handicapped (残疾的):
LEAs will give up to ￡500 to help meet extra expenses—such as buying a tape recorder for a blind student, extra heating or special food.
Banking:
Most of the big banks offer special services to students who open accounts (in the hope that they will stay with the bank when they become rich officials). A student won’t usually have to pay bank charges as long as the account stays in credit. Some banks allow students to overdraw by ￡100 or so, and still don’t make charges (though they do charge interest).A student from Japan who has been staying in England for a year and intends to go to college in a few months will _________.
| A．get money if he is taking a first degree course |
| B．be unable to get money from any LEA |
| C．get money from any LEA when he has finished his course |
| D．have to open a bank account before he gets any money |
Which of the following is TRUE?
| A．A student already attending a course of advanced education is sure to get a grant. |
| B．A student aged 30 can get extra money—￡615 a year. |
| C．A student usually must pay back charges when the account is in credit. |
| D．Students are allowed to overdraw by ￡100 or so in any bank. |
Why is it likely that a bank will welcome new students as their customers?
| A．They know students receive money regularly. |
| B．They charge students extra. |
| C．They hope students will be rich in the future. |
| D．They need student accounts in term-time. |
Where can you probably read this passage?
| A．A notice-board in a college. | B．A dictionary. |
| C．A newspaper. | D．A banking office. |
There is a wonderful story about a young girl who had no family and no one to love her.
One day, feeling very sad and lonely, she was walking through a grassland when she noticed a small butterfly caught in a thorn (荆棘) bush. The young girl carefully released the butterfly. Instead of flying away, the little butterfly changed into a beautiful fairy. The young girl rubbed her eyes in disbelief.
“For your wonderful kindness,” the good fairy said to the girl, “I will give you any wish you would like.” The little girl thought for a moment and then replied, “I want to be happy.” The fairy leaned toward her and whispered in her ear. Then the fairy disappeared.
As the little girl grew up, there was no one in the land as happy as she. Everyone asked her the secret of happiness. She would only smile and answer, “The secret of my happiness is that I listened to a good fairy when I was a little girl.”
When she was very old and on her deathbed, the neighbors all gathered around her, believing that her unbelievable secret of happiness would die with her. “Tell us, please,” they begged, “Tell us what the good fairy said.” The lovely old woman simply smiled and said, “She told me that everyone, no matter how secure they seemed, no matter how old or young, how rich or poor, had need of me.”Noticing the butterfly was caught by the thorn, the orphan girl _______.
| A．helped the butterfly escape from the thorn |
| B．felt sad, but she didn′t go up to help it |
| C．fell down on it too[ |
| D．failed to help it release from the thorn |
The butterfly _________ after it was saved by the little girl.
| A．flew away | B．still died |
| C．changed into a fairy | D．was more beautiful than before |
The only thing that the little girl wanted was_________.
| A．to be rich | B．to have her own parents |
| C．to have a lot of friends | D．to be happy |
The neighbors all gathered around the old happy woman when she was dying, because ______.
| A．they loved this woman deeply and they didn′t want her to die |
| B．the woman had lots of money to be shared after she died |
| C．they wanted to know the secret of her lifetime happiness |
| D．they wanted to pray for her after her death |
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